Yesterday my brain put me on lock-down. It was supposed to be a normal Saturday. M and I would have coffee at 9:30 at the Peet's downtown. At 5 to 10 we would part ways- she'd go to her Al-Anon meeting and I'm hop on BART to the city to catch my NA meeting. Then I'd have lunch with my sponsor, come home, goof around with M, watch her work on projects, and to wrap it up, dinner plans in this city with a friend.
But something went wrong yesterday. I made it to our coffee date (well, it was a half-hot chocolate date because I gave up coffee for Lent) but as 10 o'clock approached I started to get nervous. The voices ramped up, the shadows behind me seemed real, and I was pretty sure crevices would open in the earth in front of me and swallow me whole.
So I told M I'd wait at Peet's for her to finish; that I couldn't make it to my meeting today. I had books, I had my journal, I would be fine. But I wasn't fine. 2 minutes after M left I freaked the fuck out and went to the car to hide. For an hour I huddled in the passenger seat hoping nothing horrible would happen. Which of course, nothing did. M got back, we ran a couple of errands, and went out to lunch. I thought maybe I had come out the other side and lived to tell the tale.
When we got home I was exhausted; paranoia, hallucinations, delusions, they all take it out of me like nothing else. And like a 5 year old I needed M to lay with me in bed until I fell asleep, to keep the Harpies at bay. When I woke up I was terrified immediately. Sometimes sleep is the only safe place and I hate the shock of waking up. I had 3 hours until I needed to make it out of the house for dinner. So I tried to pull myself together. I self-soothed like crazy- drank iced tea, watched my gymnast-girl-TV-drama series, and asked for reassurance and hugs at every twist and turn in my brain.
When dinner time came, I couldn't fathom leaving the house. Shadows outside were lurking, the Harpies were convincing me that the world was coming to an end and it were best if I stayed inside, and I just WANTED to be comfortable for even a minute. But along with all of that was the reality that I wouldn't be making it out of the house that night, and on top of it all I had to call my friend and tell her I was too afraid to leave my apartment to come over for dinner. I felt like a horrible person and like a failure, but I just couldn't get myself outside.
There's no quick and clean way to end this story. M and I made dinner, which I survived without event (and it was delicious) and then I made the simple decision to take my socks into the bedroom to put them with the laundry. And it all fell apart again. Fear flooded in and I threw myself onto the bed in the darkness to hide (it's better when it's dark inside, because it makes it that much lighter outside where things tend to lurk). I didn't want to ruin a perfectly nice evening, and M wanted to take a bath, so the question was posed "what was I going to do?" What seemed like a perfectly logical answer was to crawl under the covers on the bedroom. I figured that if M was going to be somewhere comfortable and soothing then that's what I should be doing too. But she coaxed me out of the bedroom, and there was where I ended up, swaddled in a blanket and plopped in front of the computer with my girl-gymnast-drama and a blog post to write.
-E
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